Thursday, 10 November 2011

After getting their collective ass handed to them in Mississippi, those persistent personhood peeps aren't giving up. They've got a raft of similar abortion-killing, birth-control-banning, miscarriage-criminalizing dealies rarin' to go.

All over the blogosphere and Twitter, fetus fetishists are advancing whacky reasons why their supposed slam-dunk failed so miserably. Here's some interesting speculation on what happened between the opinion polls -- that indicated it would pass easily -- and the voting booth by Amanda Marcotte. (Hint: secret ballots are excellent things in conformist conservative jerkwater places like Mississippi.)

But my favourite load of BS is by SUZYALLCAPSLOCK. This is a link to the tweet linking to HER post. Two clicks but no juvenile redirect to fetus pr0n.

Commenter lastchancetosee sums up HER increasingly desperate explanations of the fiasco:

So to recap:a) even Pro-Lifers opposed it, preferring to actively pursue a humiliating defeat by voting against it than succeeding in passing it and thus stopping the "abortion holocaust" at least temporarily, not to mention the PR advantages, and precedent etc.*b) if the Catholic Church with its negligible following in Mississippi had recommended voting for it, hundreds of thousands of non-Catholic voters would have marched to the polls for this, when their own convictions and religious leaders weren't enough to do so.c) due to unspecified "circumstances" people decided to kill an initiative they supportedd) this is actually a huge win for the pro-life cause because a vote that was expected to be a close thing was a very clear knock-down, and that is a good thing.e) this result still has absolutely nothing to do with 60% of the people, including many pro-lifers, opposing this measure.

The nile is not just a river in egypt.

* you do know what the purpose of all these initiatives for amendments, laws etc. is, do you? To get as many as them passed as possible, so that they get challenged in the courts, until you find one case where a court sides with you, thereby creating precedent. The people who push these things KNOW that they will be challenged. They WANT them to be challenged. Why do you think it is that most of these things have so very obvious constitutional issues?This being challenged in the Supreme Court is a BONUS, not a drawback. But sure, pro-lifers opposed it because they feared it might be overturned ….

As pro-life political scientist and abortion law researcher Michael New explains, if the amendment can’t win in Mississippi, it’s likely not going to win anywhere in the current political climate.

“It is difficult to see where Personhood proponents go from here. Tuesday’s election offered Personhood supporters their best opportunity for electoral success. They qualified a citizen initiative in Mississippi — among the most pro-life states in the country — during a low-turnout election in which Democrats fielded relatively weak statewide candidates,” he explains. “In spite of all this, the Mississippi Personhood Amendment still lost by a double-digit margin.”

Knowing that the personhood amendment lost by a landslide twice in a swing state and a lopsided 17-point margin in arguably the most pro-life state in the nation, there’s little realistic expectation that the personhood amendment will be approved anywhere in the country. As the amendment continues to rack up defeats, support from pro-fie advocates willing to invest in what will almost assuredly be a losing proposition will wane. Media reports will continue focusing on the pro-life movement losing at the polls and the pro-abortion side will continue gloating that they are in the majority despite clear polling data showing America is pro-life.

The damage to the pro-life movement from suffering defeat after defeat in the polls will become more and more palpable as the losses mount.

LifeShite's strategy is to get more misogynist Supreme Court justices.

Of course they're not giving up. They're still being given completely out of proportion political currency by 'elected' officials, who are also engaged in willfully disenfranchising persons who might disagree with reactionary right imperatives.

I sometimes wonder how many high profile politicians would profess in public the sun goes around the earth if their campaign money and slush funds came from billionaires that rejected astronomy and the apology to Galileo in favour of geocentrism. There *are* people who are vociferous geocentrists, they're just not rich as Midas and intent on making everyone else kowtow to their bilgewater, so they still have the whiff of lunacy emanating from them.

But then, why should the politicians stop serving financial seducers? How many of them throughout history haven't observed their personal survival is improved short and long term by following the plutocracy model, no matter their alleged democratic fiduciary responsibilities?